Committee chairman Senator Keith Laught was a great proponent of both the metric and the committee system.

While tabling his report in May 1968, Laught described committees as ‘the workshops of parliaments’. He particularly praised their value in providing industry and trade representatives with direct opportunities to put their views before the Senate

Laught died suddenly on 13 May 1969, almost exactly one year later. Although he had been frustrated to see his report ‘gathering dust’ immediately after its tabling, Australia’s 1970 adoption of the metric system is now viewed as Laught’s principal legacy.

The introduction of the metric system significantly affected household tasks such as shopping and preparing food—traditionally viewed as the ‘women’s domain’.

Reflecting this view, the committee made a point of recommending that ‘at least one member of the [Metric Conversion] Board should be a woman’.

On 1 July 1970 Dame Mabel Miller, who had previously served as Hobart City Council’s first female member, was one of thirteen appointees to the Board.

The most significant opposition to metrication in Australia came in the form of the Australian Anti-Metric Association, described by a member of the Metric Conversion Board as ‘small but vocal’.

The association wrote a number of letters to parliamentarians during the 1970s but received only brief mentions in the press. Ironically, these letters, now held in the University of Melbourne Archives, are listed as taking up 0.005 metres of shelf space.

Weather reporting was an early converter—the Bureau of Meteorology began measuring temperature in degrees Celsius rather than Fahrenheit from 1 September 1972.

As part of its public education campaign, the Bureau distributed pamphlets and ran a series of jingles describing Celsius temperatures as follows: ‘frosty fives’, ‘tingling tens’, ‘temperate twenties’, ‘thirsty thirties’ and ‘flaming forties’.